Media commentary from a recovering journalist.

November 04, 2012

I’m sick of social media and I’m sure most of you are, too. It’s done, it’s old and it’s out of touch with modern life.

Giving clients a social media strategy used to make agencies and clients look smart, now it just makes us look pathetic. Social media is nothing more than a buzzword, a security blanket, an emperor with no clothes.

I’m not saying social media isn’t important – of course it is. All I’m saying is the definition no longer makes sense. The public has moved on while we cling to a world of “10 Tips for Effective Content Marketing” listicle bullshit. Seriously, I just made that headline up yet look what I found.

When all media is social, there is no more social media. That’s not just some pithy quote for one of those stupid ribbons you get at social media conferences, like “Byte Me” or “Social Media Douchebag.” Recognizing that all media is social is the truth no one wants to face. But continuing to pretend that social media is something separate from “traditional” communications, internal or external, is just ignorance on a Google-like scale.

All media is social (it’s about people). All media is earned (it’s about attention.) All media is online (and it’s offline, too.)

The only reason there is still a line between “social” media and “traditional” media is because marketers like us insist on drawing the damn thing, despite the fact that nobody outside our insular industry cocoon cares.

People don’t see ads, press releases, Facebook updates, “brand journalism” or “branded entertainment” – they just see media. They talk about it and they share it. They see right through us and directly into whether a brand is saying something or just selling them something.

Yes, “social media” also refers to technology platforms like Facebook and YouTube, but that distinction is a bunch of crap too. A piece of technology isn’t any more social than a tree stump. People make technology social, period.

E-mail and Listserves were “social” media long before Twitter was in diapers. Tools like Facebook and Wordpress simply allowed people to record and save their conversations in a public setting vs. being relegated to local hard drives. If doing this makes blogs or Facebook more social, then yes, I agree, but that doesn’t make them the only social media in town.

We need to move forward and catch up with the public. We’re part of the public too, after all, try as we might to pretend we’re different or know any better.

Let’s get on with doing great work and stop worrying whether our media programs are social, traditional, earned, paid, owned or shared. Let’s focus on our clients’ business goals, not their Klout scores.

If we do our job, all of our media programs will be social – I mean, in 2013, how can they be anything else?

August 16, 2012

I'M CONSISTENTLY AMAZED BY how many companies engage in social media and forget that the word “social” is right there. But I don’t entirely blame them – I blame us.

By “us” I mean the so-called professional communicators who are supposed to know better. Yet we too often stand idle while our clients treat Twitter as a one-way broadcast channel.

We created this monster largely because we allowed our clients to categorize digital, and social media in particular, as technology. We used words like “tools” and “content” and “apps” to sell in our services – and in doing so we reduced the greatest advancement in the history of communication to little more than a moribund pile of silicon chips.

"Digital" is not about technology – it’s about sociology and culture, it’s about people and emotion. Social media is the most human form of communication ever invented because humans are the platform.

There is no “digital” or social media without technology, of course. Technology is like the heart – it’s a muscle, a power source and an engine that is necessary to keep things moving.

But if technology is the heart of social media, then we are its soul.

This wasn’t necessarily the case in the First Web Era of the ‘90s. Then technology ruled the digital world – you could have Web sites, search engines and online advertising that didn’t need people to exist, just a lot of money and an IT department. It was all heart and no soul.

Now think about YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest or even most Web sites today. None of these “social” channels would exist without people. YouTube would be empty, eBay would be a vacant lot, a Facebook page would have no one to “like” it (not that "liking" a Facebook page matters anyway, but that's for another post.)

Search would still be a collection of links, not real-time results based on what people are talking about. Advertising would be stuck in irrelevance, unable to find anyone interested in the ads because there wouldn’t be any people talking or sharing.

E-mail was the “killer app” of the ‘90s, but today people are the killer app.

So let’s stop casting digital in the light of technology. Instead of “social media,” which is a noun and easy to think of as a tool, think in terms of “media is social” – a verb that conjures images of action and emotion. See how this little change in perception will have a huge impact on how you approach the way you communicate.

Maybe the heart can beat without a soul, but a heart without a soul is an empty life – and an empty digital world.

July 24, 2012

This isn’t something the traditional digital advertising industry wants to hear (and yes, there is such a thing as “traditional” digital advertising.) Clicks equal cash goes the maxim, though those selling clicks are the ones who make the real cash – not necessarily the companies trying to get customers to click on their ads.

The evidence is everywhere. A recent study published in AdAge found virtually no relationship between a click and an actual conversion; time spent viewing or hovering over the ads actually scored better.

Insisting that clicks on ads equals campaign success is flawed logic at best. Said the CEO of the company that commissioned the aforementioned study: “My key takeaway is that optimizing to viewable impressions or hover time is a better proxy for a brand advertiser than a click-through rate.”

True, however there is a larger trend here than all direct marketers turning into brand advertisers (itself a scary thought.) The real impact, and the key trend to watch, is all about time.

Capturing Your “Share of Time”
In a way, marketing has always been about time. For decades there wasn’t much of a need to measure time, since there were so few media options. The focus was on audience numbers, whether than audience spent a few minutes or a few hours with your programming.

No longer. We now have infinite choices and channels; media is unbundled and fragmented. With so much choice the “impression” is now meaningless – it’s not a true indicator of brand recall or connection.

All that matters is time. And time is what we need to measure. Forget the click – today, it’s all about the clock.

The path to earning greater “share of time” online is through storytelling and engagement that taps into people’s emotions. This is a large reason why video – especially short-form and serialized stories – continues to expand. As a recent Fast Company article noted, people are spending at least 22 hours a month watching online video, a number from April that’s certainly even higher now and will continue to rise.

Good marketing is good storytelling, and stories capture people’s attention – and their time – far better than a static direct-response banner ad. Stories that go beyond one-way interaction and tap into more immersive and participatory transmedia, such as USA Networks’ “Sights Unseen” adventure, not only capture time but bring people into a brand experience that traditional online marketing tactics simply could never hope to achieve.

Fish where the fish are, the saying goes – this too is about time. Print, radio and TV use is declining while Internet and mobile steadily rise. More people today go online via mobile devices than their PCs.

Time is about place as well as engagement. It’s about earning attention and trust, not expecting it. And most of all, it’s about accepting that the audience has moved on even if your marketing is still stuck in the past.

Watch the clock, not the click. Spend your time measuring what matters.

July 06, 2012

ALTHOUGH I CAN'T TRACE THE ORIGIN with any certainty, I’m nevertheless pretty sure that the word “content” was first used by a marketer, not a by a journalist.

Journalists are in the business of stories. Always have been – and despite the 24/7 streams of info-snacks and feeds forced through ever-congested virtual pipes, they always will be.

So it should come as no surprise that a recent global study of journalists found that journalists don’t want “pre-packaged” news such as press releases, and instead are “looking for variety in the kinds of stories brands talk about and the way they are told. And they expect brands to be properly engaged with the relevant social networks – not a box-ticking exercise driven by the PR department, but a genuine engagement at all levels of the business.”

In other words, stop with the “content.” Even the word “content” is cold, distant. Content is artificial intelligence. Content fills the feed but leaves you hungry.

Stories, however, are emotional. Stories are history personified. Technology may be the heart of social media, the muscle that keeps it moving, but stories are its soul.

Journalists tell stories and want to be told stories. According to the study, they also want brands to “deploy a full range of storytelling assets – brand stories must be supported by videos, images, infographics.”

It’s also critical that the story be told consistently across platforms and social channels – media fragmentation demands clear narrative so the story doesn’t get lost or misinterpreted like a bad game of “telephone.” These narratives can and should vary based on the channels and makeup of the audience, but ultimately they need to be connected to a larger central theme.

With so much noise disguised as news, journalists want to hear from trusted sources and be engaged in real dialogue with real people. Social media gives brands a perfect opportunity to earn that trust – and if brands are ready, journalists are listening.

June 17, 2012

EVERY FATHER'S DAY I use this space to remember those who don't or perhaps never had fathers. Usually I just repost this story, originally published in 1990 when I was a newspaper columnist.

Today, however, I decided to reach all the way back to 2010 and share a post I wrote titled "Social Media, Milkshakes and Life After Death." You see, when I wrote that first story in 1990, I wasn't a father myself. Now with a daughter about to enter high school, well let's just say I have a new appreciation for dads and what we do, which in my case is to try and screw up as little as possible.

The post is republished below -- and wherever you are this Father's Day, and whatever you do, remember that it will be more meaningful than anything you do at work come Monday.

Social Media, Milkshakes, and Life After Death

(originally appeared December 2010)

ONCE IN A WHILE, less often now than before, someone asks about my dad, and I tell them I never knew my father. He died when when I very young, I say, and therefore I never knew him other than in faded pictures and fractured stories.

I’ve said this so many times for so many years that I believed it to be true. But it’s not. It’s not a lie, but it’s not true, either.

I knew my father. I was 8-years-old when he died, so of course I knew him. I just don’t remember him. In fact I don’t remember anything about my life prior to the morning when I heard he died.

My memory up to that point was erased. I knew my family members and where I lived, but my experiences were gone -- including any experiences I had with my father.

As bad as it sounds, it really wasn’t a problem for me. I wasn’t sad about having lost my dad because, in my mind, I never had one. And you can’t mourn for something you never had. My mind created the ultimate defense against loss: The inability to recall ever having lost in the first place.

I was in the car with my 12-year-old daughter. She was drinking a milkshake and had put it in the cup holder when, suddenly, I had this urge to tell her to hold the cup and be careful not to spill it. And just as suddenly I saw my dad, in my head, yelling at me for spilling a milkshake in his car, a brand new Cadillac.

A memory. A real memory, bursting through my synapses with the force of 36 years, propelled by the power of milk and ice cream.

I don’t know why -- whether it was the milkshake that shook the memory from its moorings, or whether it was because I was driving my new car, which made me remember my dad’s new car and the apparent anxiety we both shared about people spilling things.

I don’t know why, all I know is it was real.

So what does any of this have to do with social media? Just this: If I die tomorrow, my daughter may not remember me, but she will know me.

Social media and search have put my entire life online. She will see me, read about me, probably learn more about me than she cared to know even if I were still alive.

Many people still see social media as the Realm of the Narcissist, a place for ego and adoration filled with banal Facebook updates and pointless Tweets. Some of that is true, although there is far more good than bad; far more about social media that moves us forward than turns us away.

I think about what it would have been like -- what I would have been like -- if social media was around when my dad died. Those banal Facebook posts would be priceless to me, those pointless tweets like sparks of light.

I still may not have remembered, but I would have known. And that, I believe, would have made all the difference.

May 12, 2012

THE WEB IS BACK. Or at least Bing, with its new social-focused interface, is trying to make the Web relevant again – while making Google less relevant in the process.

Over the coming weeks, Bing users will not only get search results, but social recommendations from multiple sources including Facebook and Twitter (and yes, Google Plus.) Search will transform into conversation, tapping your friends and other “influencers” to guide your actions. So for example, if I’m looking for a good sushi restaurant in Los Angeles, Bing will find Facebook friends who posted about sushi in LA and may have a recommendation for me.

It’s search with a pulse. It’s not even a search anymore – it’s discovery.

But most of all, the new Bing is a call to arms against the modern, siloed, fragmented Web.

Planet of the Apps
The World Wide Web is now the Planet of the Apps. Bing wants to be the unifier, to break down the silicon walls and be the one-stop shop for people, places and ideas. There are still some blind spots, but Bing is at least trying to be the Master Curator of All Things Social online.

And let’s also be honest – Bing, meaning Microsoft, wants to kick Google’s ass in the process.

Google’s “Search Plus Your World” approach delivers results from its own Google Plus social network pages more prominently than other Web properties like Wikipedia. This is supposed to make search more personal and relevant – who you know and what your friends like, or share, or do, will have a greater influence on what you see in your search results.

The problem, at least for now, is Google focuses primarily on Google Plus, and even then still delivers results as part of a list entwined with static pages. Google provides links but doesn’t necessarily spur conversations. And it’s still a walled garden at least in term of the broader social web – Google in fact is becoming less like the web and more like an app.

Communities of IntentBing isn’t perfect either and still has a long way to go to catch Google in terms of market share and ad dollars. Bing merely won a battle in what will be a long war.

But this battle also represents a significant shift. What true social or conversational search does is move us from interest to intent.

Facebook is great at revealing interest – whether I like cars, for example. Seeing this, an advertiser may target me with car ads. But just because I “liked” the Mercedes page doesn’t mean I want to buy one. I may already own a Mercedes, or maybe I just liked a video they posted. I have an interest in the brand, but uncovering my intent is a far more difficult proposition.

But what if advertisers knew I was looking to buy a Mercedes very soon, and could target me at the very moment I expressed that interest? I’d be a more valuable lead, and therefore media or search properties like Bing could charge a lot more for the pleasure of reaching me.

Communities of Interest are broad and largely static, but “Communities of Intent” are specific, focused, and fleeting. The more that search moves away from providing static results and toward providing fluid conversations that lead to identifiable actions, the more that Communities of Intent will give advertisers quality prospects – and give people ads that they may actually want to receive.

(Disclaimer: Microsoft, which owns Bing, is a client, however I don’t work or communicate with the Bing team.)

May 07, 2012

As buzzwords go, story isn’t entirely bad -- for years I’ve pushed clients to be storytellers. I’ve berated the descent of story into a furtive sea of “content,” stripping all emotion from human pursuits.

So I’m good with story. But let’s be honest, success lies not in the idea but in the execution. And the truth is most brands will suck at storytelling.

Why? Because most brands won't do what good storytelling requires.

Stories – real, honest, emotional, transformative and inspirational stories – have conflict. They have villains. They have winners and losers. They have personality and flaws, great highs and severe lows.

In other words, stories have many of the things that brands don’t want anyone to know about. So the content – err, sorry, the “stories” they create – get sanitized. Every story ends with “and they lived happily ever after.” That’s great for fairytales but not for real life.

The non-fiction story about a company is inherently more interesting than any fiction created for the purpose of earning friends, followers and customers. It’s what has always worked for marketers and still does:

Tell a great story

Create emotional impact

Embrace your friends and respect your enemies

Acknowledge mistakes, then fix them

Don’t ask for trust or loyalty, earn it

Notice I didn’t use the word “strategy.” That’s essential, of course, but too often companies create a strategy first, and then the story. A better approach is first to have a story – not a mission statement or a press release, but a real story. The strategy is the easy part.

Brands aren’t buildings and companies are not logos. There are human beings behind them all, not a great and powerful Oz.

Just tell us a good story, we'll listen. And if you still just want to produce “content” that's fine, as long as you keep calling it “content.” Leave story alone.

March 06, 2012

Remember the days when Facebook would launch new features and then announce them? What a difference an impending IPO makes.

Now Facebook not only tells us what’s going happen, it has day-long events to educate and court marketers, as evidenced by last week’s Facebook Marketing Conference in New York City. And make no mistake: Facebook is all about marketing now. This isn’t a bad thing or a good thing; it’s just the natural order of things. Welcome to adulthood, Facebook.

But perhaps the clearest sign of Facebook’s power is that the decisions Facebook makes as a business have far-reaching implications for other businesses. What Facebook did last week was nothing short of making every other company that wants to advertise on the platform rethink its own business model, not to mention forcing them to dedicate more resources (i.e., money) to “content development” and engagement.

There are three key reasons why Facebook now matters more than ever to brand marketers:

1) A Tougher Sell: Facebook is rolling out more paid products, but the format will make it harder for brands that don’t have compelling stories or “content” to share – harder still for those who just want to sell you something. I’m fine with the latter, as I’d rather have a brand be honest about the fact that it just wants me to buy something vs. a brand that tries to tell me a “story.” Regardless, some brands will need to change how they connect with customers, which leads me to reason number two...

2) No More “Random Acts of Content”: The Timeline format places storytelling and a new narrative structure, the “layered narrative,” front and center – brands can no longer get away with pushing random and reckless pieces of content through the channel.

Layered narratives allow space for interaction, sharing, collaboration and contribution. Every unique layer makes the source material stronger and the story more engaging. Many brands, however, haven't done this very well. The “early days” of social media marketing -- you know, 2005 or so -- saw brands simply putting their commercials on YouTube or posting press releases on their blogs. The "stories" were meant to be consumed, not shared. Narrative became lecture and story became content.

The digital world expanded but brands did not expand with it.Facebook is now forcing the issue by treating all content – whether a traditional display ad unit or a comment in a new feed – as related chapters in an overall and evolving brand story.

3) End of the “Ownership” Debate: It’s the number one issue inside most companies and agencies – who “owns” social? Is it PR or Marketing? Is it corporate or the business units? The product teams or the customer service folks?

I’ve said for years and to deaf ears that no one function can “own” social media any more than someone can own the air you breathe. And now Facebook has made it official.

With premium advertising now originating from the brand page, it’s essential that earned, owned, paid and shared media are closely coordinated. Think about it: Facebook page community managers create content but are not the same people who create or buy ads – but ads are now, well, “content.” At the very least these two groups need to talk to each other.

PR, marketing, customer service, creative, product, analytics, corporate – everyone needs to work together or the results will suffer. New models and processes will be needed – for example, creating an “audience engagement team” with people from all these areas represented and led by a “quarterback” who calls the plays and ensures that the team plays as one cohesive unit. There will be many new approaches I’m sure, but what’s clear is that the days of the marketing and PR “silos” are over.

One Reason Why the New Facebook Shouldn’t Matter to Marketers at All

There’s a classic Chris Rock routine in which he ridicules people for being proud of things they are supposed to do anyway. “I take care of my kids,” he says, imitating his subject. “You’re supposed to take of your kids!” Rock screams in mock response.
Rock was right – you don’t deserve credit or kudos for things you are supposed to do. So why should we praise brands who, thanks to Facebook, are now dedicating themselves to having deeper relationships with their customers?

I have a question for every brand marketer on the planet: Are you so out of touch with the digital consumer that you needed a technology company to teach you how to talk to your own customers? Really?

You needed another company’s advertising products to convince you to tell real stories and connect with your customers? And now you want credit as an early adopter and trailblazer? You’re kidding, right?

Brands should have been doing this anyway, Facebook or no Facebook. The unfortunate reality, however, is that Facebook’s decision to change its own business model will result in a lot of crap being produced, as everyone will try to become a content marketer, err, I mean “storyteller” now.

Do yourselves and your customers a favor: Don't make the new Facebook a clarion call for creating content, make it a wake-up call for getting back to the basics of listening, learning, and communicating with people as people, not as data.

Do this not just for Facebook or because of Facebook – do this because it’s the right thing to do.

February 26, 2012

Not all that long ago – albeit longer than we may care to admit – families gathered around large living room radios and listened to news, dramas, comedies and live music. People read newspapers and heard the words spring to life in their heads.

We watched and listened to television. Along came the Internet and we listened, the words and pictures and videos grafting onto our collective consciousness with immutable force.

We consumed, we thought, we learned and kept listening, listening, listening.

Then, one day, we found a voice. We always had one, of course, but now with social media, our voice could be heard.

So we talked. A comment here, a blog post there – a video, a photo, a review, a status update, a tweet, a pin, a question, a commentary, a discussion; an argument.

Everybody talking, everybody “engaging in conversation” and “creating content.” It sounds wonderful, and by and large it is – in fact it’s one of the greatest advances in human culture since moveable type.

But now that we all have printing presses, we all believe we can be writers. Now that we all have a radio and a TV network, we feel the need to develop and distribute “programming” (or re-distribute others’ programming as is more often the case.)

We are talking so much that we have stopped listening – or at very least it’s getting harder to hear, so we compensate by talking louder and more often, hoping some of us will get the message between rushed breaths.

The more scarce and precious something is, the more valuable and important it becomes. But there is so much talking, so much “content,” so many aggregated and curated echoes that there’s no longer any value or meaning. Ideas get lost in the binary fog, swallowed whole by the cacophony of endless creation.

February 20, 2012

For that title you need to go back to Compuserve and AOL 1.0, back even to the Usenet and BBS systems. You need to add blogs and communities like iVillage to the list, and countless groups, services and platforms dedicated to one thing: Creating Communities of Interest.

They are everywhere now, in places like Facebook and Google Plus, and more recently in Pinterest, which uses visual storytelling to connect people by interest and passion. People are more comfortable in their similarities than in their differences, making Communities of Interest like Pinterest the natural order of things rather than another social media trend.

But while Communities of Interest are like us, they are not “Us.” They are places but not Our Places. They are what we do, what we love – but they are not who we are.

They are not Identity.

This, too, is changing. Communities of Identity are coming. These are the permanent, personal connections – and for many, they are the way back from social media overload, from Communities of Interest that create more distance even as they pull more people together.

Newspapers: The First Communities of Identity

Communities of Identity are already here – in fact they were here long before the electronic media age. We called them local newspapers.

There was a time when all newspapers were local, when “the paper” was both progenitor and steward of a community’s identity. If you wanted to know what a town was like, what made that geography different or special from others, you didn’t need to look any further than the newspaper.

As mass media proliferated, however, newspapers moved away from connecting to their communities by geographic, ethnic or historical roots. Suburban flight, competition and technology forced a homogenization of the news. Papers had to look regionally and nationally, and in doing so they got away from identity and rallied around interest, focusing on broader connections and looser ties.

News became sensationalized. Talking (or yelling) at the audience became more commonplace than listening to people or representing them. Value was placed on sharing common interests, the more “common” the better.

In this environment, news in one paper became indistinguishable from news in another paper thousands of miles away. Identity was gone, replaced by the more treasured metric of “impressions” and “views.”

Journalism Leads the Way Back

This worked for a while – in fact it still works for most, with the emphasis now on aggregating and curating news for Communities of Interest. But the future of news will come more from its past than its present.

News, especially in today’s highly social environments, thrives best when it’s small. Personal connections are emotional, and I’d argue that emotions run deeper when connected to a hometown vs. a hobby.

As the world gets bigger we look for ways to make it smaller and feel a connection to the places and people that define us. “Content” can’t do this but “stories” can. Journalism can lead the way forward by focusing inward.

Community newspapers are not in retreat but rather experiencing a sort of renaissance. According the to the National Newspaper Association, 86 million Americans read community newspapers (papers with 15,000 circulation or less – in other words, 80 percent of all U.S. papers.) The paper is the primary source of news for small communities, 10 times higher than the Internet. And advertising revenues are increasing.

The same can be seen online – digital-only operations such as the Texas Tribune and the St. Louis Beacon are breaking headlines and making money. And beyond news we are seeing growth in Communities of Identity like Ancestry.com, which allow people to connect pan-geographically as well as by common heritage.

Communities of Interest aren’t going anywhere, either – you don’t need to look any further than Pinterest to see that. But even those communities will ebb back toward identity, for the true power of social media is not in how we see others, but in how we see ourselves.